Category Archives: Democrats

UPDATED: GOP, RIP, AWOL On IRS

Democrats, Ethics, Liberty, Republicans, Taxation

Seventy one percent of Americans want the Internal Revenue Service investigated for targeting tea-party groups (presumably for opposing Barack Obama).

Pat Caddell is perhaps the only Democrat (other that Dennis Kucinich) capable of expressing righteous indignation over such stuff—stuff that should outrage every moral human being with some affinity for the principles of liberty, namely a government subject, at the very least, to the same laws as the governed.

“Establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after Tea-Party groups,” contended Caddell. These groups “are an outside threat to their power hold, the lobbying-consulting class of the Republican party. The IRS now may also proceed against businesses that are cutting their work force. It is a lawless organization that no one will investigate.”

AND:

“This is about preserving privileges and arrangements that benefit these people over the country. And I’d say… it is worse than seedy. It is worse than corrupt. It is the issue that no one is allowed to speak up and the American people in the polls know it. This is a corrupt political system that doesn’t function, and as Michael Dukakis once said: It rots from the head down.”

Lest you think I’ve been taken in by Caddell, here is another instance, documented on BAB, where Caddell cannot contain his visceral revulsion for the abuse of power to which Americans are subjected. Is Caddell perhaps an Old Democrat; one of those good Dixiecrats?

Former polster Caddell was able to get to the crux of the arrest and attempted prosecution of a parent for questioning the pedagogues about the Common-Core Curriculum.

“What we saw here is bigger than just this. The people are the slaves to the office-holders: superintendents who won’t take questions, the EPA that goes to Alaska on to conduct a … raid, SWAT converging with guns on a gold-mining operation in a little town; the things that government does now to oppress people; the laws that we have, the NSA, the fear people have of the state spying on them and imposing on them–this is a kind of soft despotism, whereby if you get out of line, we’ll get you. We work for them. Public servants are the masters; we are the servants of the political class.”

UPDATE (6/24): “Seventy six percent of voters think IRS emails were deliberately destroyed.”

UPDATED: Putting Lipstick On The Pigs At NSA*

Constitution, Democrats, Homeland Security, Propaganda, Republicans, Technology, Terrorism

We’re doing the right thing; we’re not doing anything illegal,” said Four-Star General Keith Alexander to Fox News’ Bret Baier. An otherwise good reporter, Baier has been asking some poignant questions of the very clever, dissembling, outgoing director of the National Security Agency’s unconstitutional, naturally illicit and all-round reprehensible spying programs. However, Baier, another bright lad, seems to be merely going through the motion; making sure he does journalistic due diligence without any forceful follow-up. A less than obligatory follow-up would be: “I know that what you do is probably ‘legal,’ but is it ‘moral’?”

The occasion of the interview? Obama’s likely bogus “calls for an end to NSA’s bulk phone data collection.”

“What would you do to Edward Snowden if you were alone in a room with him” was more revealing of Baier’s sympathies. Alexander vaporized about the assorted entrapment operations to which hoovering up trillions of messages have led. (More about “The Dynamics of Entrapment.”)

BAIER: Former President Jimmy Carter saying he writes letters instead of sending e-mails because he’s worried that you’re listen — you’re reading his e-mails.

ALEXANDER: Well, we’re not. So he can now go back to writing e-mails. The reality is, we don’t do that. And if we did, it would be illegal and we’d be found, uh, I think accoun — held accountable and responsible. Look at all the folks that have looked at what we’re doing, from the president’s review group to Congress to the courts to the DNI, DOD, Justice. Everybody reviews what we do to see if anybody is doing anything illegal like you suggest. No one has found anything, zero, except for in 12 cases where people did that and we had already reported those.

* With apologies to pretty pigs.

UPDATE (3/26): The great Glenn Greenwald seems surprised that, much like Republicans, Democrats are opportunistic, lying, bottom-feeders. He notes that “what rational people do, by definition, is” this:

if a political official takes a position you agree with, then you support him, but when he does a 180-degree reversal and takes the exact position that you’ve been disagreeing with, then you oppose him. That’s just basic. Thus, those of us who originally defended Obama’s decision to release the photos turned into critics once he took the opposite position – the one we disagreed with all along – and announced that he would try to suppress the photos.
But that’s not what large numbers of Democrats did. Many of them first sided with Obama when his administration originally announced he’d release the photos. But then, with equal vigor, they also sided with Obama when – a mere two weeks later – he took the exact opposition position, the very anti-transparency view these Democrats had been attacking all along when voiced by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney.
At least for me, back then, that was astonishing to watch. It’s one thing to strongly suspect that people are simply adopting whatever views their party’s leader takes. But this was like the perfect laboratory experiment to prove that: Obama literally took exact opposition positions in a heated debate within a three week period and many Democrats defended him when he was on one side of the debate and then again when he switched to the other side.

“The Leader is right when he does X, and he’s equally right when he does Not X. That’s the defining attribute of the mindset of a partisan hack, an authoritarian, and the standard MSNBC host. …”

MORE.

Where’s The Equal Division Of Labor Between Liars?

Democrats, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Republicans

Am I correct to suspect, from perusing its “truth-o-meter statements,” that PolitiFact.com has a preference for certain “truths” over others?

The site is the winner of the prize establishment bores and boors give themselves: The Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

Just look at the Pulitzer winners over the years in the Commentary category. To borrow from a Camile-Paglia description: “catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queens; empty vessels,” all. One pleasure of reading online is that one never has to see anything written by people like Maureen Dowd, Kathleen Parker, Eugene Robinson, Thomas Friedman and Cynthia Tucker! “I ignore their hypertext like spam for penis extenders.”

Back to PolitFact. I would think that in the Demopublican confederacy of knaves, members of both parties would feature equally as liars, but are lie detectors biased too?

It doesn’t look like it from the latest statements PolitiFact.com has reviewed. I could be wrong, but practically everything bad said about Obamacare is marked as a false statement.

UPDATED: Procedural Mishap Turns Democrat Elijah Cummings Into M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever)

Democrats, Politics, Republicans, Taxation

It’s in the nature of politics in this country. The terrifying Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted conservative non-profits and conservative individuals. Yet a procedural silliness has made Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings the focus of attention, as the M.O.P.E (Most Oppressed Person Ever) in the IRS scandal. (The IRS is a scandal.)

Long story cut short: The American President’s Woman, Lois Lerner, who was likely involved in the “agency’s improper targeting of conservative groups,” has once again refused to talk, taking “the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nine times during the House Oversight Committee hearing,” a constitutional right that ought not be available to state officials.

Rep. Cummings of Maryland began carrying on like a crazed man when “Congressman Darrell Issa of California” “shut down the committee hearing on Wednesday when the IRS official at the center of the scandal” refused to talk.

Issa … defended his actions and told reporters after the hearing: “He was not directing questions toward the witness and the committee [had] already adjourned.”

He later told Fox News that Cummings “was simply endlessly slandering the efforts of the committee.”

Members of both parties, though, have apparently criticized Issa’s actions.

MORE mindlessness.

UPDATE: Search engines are probably biased. It is not easy to find the text of the emails released in 2013, that “show that Lois Lerner “specifically singled out applications for tax-exempt status from organizations that described themselves as right-wing ‘tea party’ groups, and ordered that the politically sensitive requests should be held in limbo until the IRS could develop a coherent policy to address them.”

The Daily Mail online has excerpted fragments of the incriminating emails, barely:

The ‘Tea Party Matter [is] very dangerous, Lerner instructed her IRS colleagues in February 2011. ‘This could be the vehicle to go to court,’ she added, on the question of whether a Supreme Court ruling about the status of political donations from corporations might also apply to nonprofit groups.
‘Counsel and Judy Kindell [Lerner’s top advisor] need to be in on this one … Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.’

MORE.

And at The Blaze.